Accurate weather forecast for a longer period – how is it possible

19.07.2017

The European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) – already outperforming all of the world’s other global forecasting systems – has become even more superior.

In 2016, ECMWF launched a new model cycle bringing improved global weather forecasts at a record-breaking resolution. The new grid on which the forecasts are run comprises of up to 904 million prediction points, three times as many as before. Together with other upgrades to ECMWF’s Integrated Forecasting System (IFS), the changes mean that Europe’s weather can now be predicted with more detail, with greater accuracy and, as a result, up to half a day further ahead.

The most overt demonstration of the European model’s superiority came in 2012 and 2015 when only it, out of more than a dozen computer forecasts, precisely predicted the particularly dangerous meteorological phenomena hitting USA – the hurricanes Sandy and Joakin.

The picture below illustrates a comparison of two precipitation forecasts for one and the same location and a period of 24 hours – the left is an output of the old ECMWF’s model and the right is produced using the new. What makes a striking difference in the second forecast is that some spurious storms (red points) have been removed. How amazing!

Source: www.ecmwf.int

“What the European modeling community is doing is just amazing,” Ryan Maue, a meteorologist with WeatherBell, shares for Ars Technica. “This is the golden age of weather forecasters. It’s an absolute wonder of computer modeling technology.”

Meteobot® – technological hope in the range of agrometeorological products – also uses the ECMWF’s model. In addition to the real-time weather data it generates for your field, the meteostation delivers a 10-day weather forecast – the first 2 days the information is updated every hour, after that the forecast is produced for 6-hour periods.